Day 2. March 2, 1862.
2
wished that no more generals might die in this division….
March Sunday 2 1862
Quite cold but calm this morning. We found ourselves in the woods but all night for a fight. We got up and eat often and then thought that we must have some dinner. It commenced to snow at 10oclock and snowed very fast and we commenced to build some brush pens to shelter us and we was getting fixed up quite comfortable and we got orders to march back to our old quarters again.* We was very much disappointed for we expected to go on to Winchester which we was very anxious to take and or that appeared to be the whole desire of the regiment. But at 3oclock we took up the line of march to our old camp where we arrived at dusk although it was the Sabbath day. I thought that it was the longest day I ever passed. I am well on the Virginia soil 2 miles from Paw Paw. Our Gen Lander died at 4 ½ oclock in the afternoon and we are sorry that he has died as he was a brave man one that would lead an army into the Battlefield but he was our Major Gen of this Division of home 20 or 25000 under his control. All men must die let them be of what station they may occupy Emperor or Princes must die. We are stationed on the hill out from Paw Paw Station and the ground is covered over with snow and I hope we may soon return home again to our quiet homes and have peace restored to our country again and all things right and our land may be as it once was
*You can hear snow hitting snow through his words. The brush pens, everyone wanting to halt, having to march on a Sunday, the longest day he thinks he ever passed. It’s cold, dark, then darker. And they’ve just begun this campaign, yet to meet Jackson.There’s still the country-wide hope the conflict will be short.
Note: 1862 view of Winchester from hill: https://www.loc.gov/item/2004661858/
Jackson in Winchester, 1862: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/jackson-in-winchester-1862-granger.html
Note: Unless otherwise specified, temperatures & brief weather descriptions that I quote from Krick’s book originate out of D.C.; this is problematic, of course, because it’s 75.4 miles (today an hour and a half drive) from D.C. to Winchester, VA. Additionally, the sunrise, sunset times originate in Richmond, VA. (a 120 mile distance from Richmond to Winchester). I include these weather reports to provide a rough sense of the conditions under which Ephraim and the men lived. However, a caveat in terms of reliable information: Robert Krick writes that Gen. Carroll didn’t cross the North River Bridge during battle but he did. My grandfather witnessed him cross, and stated the fact twice in his diary. Krick, naturally, had no comment when contacted by his publisher who forwarded my email. Here’s Krick, part 1 of 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROEEqnVSs98
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 51
“7a.m. 31; 2p.m. 36; 9p.m. 34. One inch snow, and drizzle at dark.”
The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War Daniel Aaron P. 264
“Lanier* was to look back on those days, when the great wind of war blew over the South, with wonder and chagrin.
“Its sound mingled with the solemnity of the church-organs and arose with the earnest words of preachers praying for guidance in the matter. It sighed in the half-breathed words of sweethearts conditioning impatient lovers with war-services. It thundered splendidly in the impassioned appeals of orators to the people. It whistled through the streets, it stole in to the firesides, it clinked glasses in bar-rooms, it lifted the grey hairs of our wise men in conventions, it thrilled through the lectures in college halls, it rustled the thumbed book-leaves of the school-rooms.”
“Who,” he asked, could resist “the fair anticipation which the new war-idea brought?” Certainly not Sidney Lanier, who believed one Southerner could whip five Yankees and took his own invincibility for granted, spare and underweight though he was. Only after the War was over did he appreciate how completely Jefferson Davis and his government expressed the will of the Southern majority, each of whom found some reason to welcome it or were at least dazzled into compliance:
“It challenged the patriotism of the sober citizen, while it inflamed the dream of the statesman, ambitious for his country or for himself. It offered test to all allegiances and loyalties; of church, of state; of private loves, of public devotion; of personal consanguinity; of social ties. To obscurity it held out eminence; to poverty, wealth; to greed, a gorged maw; to speculation, legalized gambling; to patriotism, a country; to statesmanship, a government; to virtue, purity; and to love, what all love most desires – a field wherein to assert itself by action.”
*Thomas C. Lanier, a Colonel of the 42nd, Alabama, out of Pickens County. He will say after the war, “We…. were whipped out and had to surrender. I am for peace now, henceforth and forever, and hope to never be in or near another war. Let those…. who wave the bloody shirt take their guns and go forth and fight; and I hope they will make a kilkenny fight and no one left to tell the tale.”
THE LATE GENERAL LANDER.
GENERAL MCCLELLAN has issued the following Order:
HEAD-QUARTERS, ARMY OF THE POTOMAC,
WASHINGTON, March 3, 1862.
“The Major-General Commanding, with deep regret, announces to the Army of the Potomac the loss of Brigadier-General Frederick W. Lander, the commander of one of its divisions, who died at Camp Chase, on the Upper Potomac, on the afternoon of the 2d instant, from the effects of a wound received in the affair with the rebels at Edwards’ Ferry, on the 22d of October, 1861. The public services of the deceased, then known as Colonel Lander, in connection with the overland route to the Pacific, had made his name familiar to the American people.”
Note: Brand, of the 66th Ohio, is in the same brigade (3rd Brigade, Lander’s Division) as Ephraim; he fights & camps alongside the 110th. Whether Ephraim & Brand ever met is unknown.
Army Life According to Arbaw: Civil War Letters of William A. Brand 66th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Edited by Daniel A. Masters P. 25 footnote 24
“An Indiana soldier described these funeral ceremonies in detail. “This morning the flags were all lowered to half-mast and draped in mourning,” he wrote. “We were ordered to fall in ranks at half past eleven with guns and accoutrements which order we obeyed and stood there until we were almost frozen, when ‘red tape’ concluded it was not quite ready yet and sent us back to our quarters. Half an hour later, we were called out again and marched down to the depot where the whole division was drawn up. Here we stood in this position two full hours in the cold. The boys repeatedly wished that no more generals might die in this division. Presently the booming of the cannons told that the procession had started from headquarters. Nine guns were fired and the corpse approached carried on the shoulders of the staff officers and followed by field officers and preceded by the Chaplains. As the procession passed between the columns, it was saluted by the division with a ‘present arms.’ When it reached the cars, the different regiments separated and went to quarters keeping step to a more cheerful music.’”
From New York Times archives March 7, 1862
“Tall of stature, and of great strength and activity, with a countenance expressive of intelligence, courage and sensibility, Gen. LANDER’s presence was commanding and attractive. As a military leader, he combined a spirit of the most daring enterprise with clearness of judgment in the adaptation of means to results. As a man, his devotion to his country, his loyalty to affection and friendship, his sympathy with suffering and his indignation at cruelty and wrong, constituted him a representative of true chivalry. He has died in the flower of his manly prime, and in the full bloom of his heroic virtues, but history will preserve the record of his life and character, and romance will delight in portraying a figure so striking, a nature so noble, and a career so gallant.”
A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War The Diaries of David Hunter Strother David Hunter Strother P. 7
“MARCH 2, SUNDAY.—… The women of this county all seem fully assured that we will presently be driven back. I never saw such a deep-seated infatuation. The men take more practical views and generally seem to have given the thing up. Some of them are still fearful as to ultimate results. I have been struck with the seedy, old-fashioned appearance of the whole people here. They look as if they had just come out of the Ark….”
The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 148 From “Continuous Hammering and Mere Attrition” Brooks D. Simpson
“If the Confederacy had indeed been doomed to defeat, the futility of such an enterprise should have been self-evident. If the quest for Southern independence could have succeeded, then one had to account for why it fell short—and that in turn meant either making a begrudging admission about the quality of the foe or searching for scapegoats or other answers.”
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 3
“For during the last twenty-five years the historians, grown more sober since the day when John Fiske could dispense with discretion and import whole fleets packed to the bowsprits with Prince Rupert’s men, have been steadily heaping up a mass of evidence that actual Cavaliers or even near-Cavaliers were rare among Southern settlers.
And, indeed, even though no such body of evidence existed, the thing would still be obvious. Men of position and power, men who are adjusted to their environment, men who find life bearable in their accustomed place—such men do not embark on frail ships for a dismal frontier where savages prowl and slay, and living is a grim and laborious ordeal. The laborer, faced with starvation; the debtor, anxious to get out of jail; the apprentice, reckless, eager for a fling at adventure, and even more eager to escape his master; the peasant, weary of the exactions of milord; the small landowner and shopkeeper, faced with bankruptcy and hopeful of a fortune in tobacco; the neurotic, haunted by failure and despair; and once in a blue moon some wealthy bourgeois, smarting under the snubs of a haughty aristocracy and fancying himself in the role of a princeling in the wilderness—all these will go. But your fat and moneyed squire, your gentleman of rank and connection, your Cavalier who is welcome in the drawing-rooms of London—almost never.”
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 176-177
“By 1860, some southerners were willing to believe that the differences between North and South were apparent from the beginning of European settlement. A correspondent in the Southern Literary Messenger wondered: “What attraction could exist between Puritan and Cavalier, between Rev. Cotton Mather and Capt. John Smith?” It was as if two separate races had somehow found themselves occupying the same contiguous geographic area and agreed to coalesce for convenience rather than on common cultural or racial grounds. Another writer summarized this argument in June 1860, just as the presidential campaign began. “A contest of races exists at present between the people of this government,” the writer explained, “the native dissimilarities which… combined, form what is called the American people.” The southern people, the writer asserted, derived from “that branch of the human race which… controls all the enlightened nations of the earth.” Northerners, on the other hand, were “more immediately descended of the English Puritans… the common people of England.”
Thus was planted the fanciful notion that North and South represented the descendants of the Roundheads and the Cavaliers, respectively, and that each section’s distinctive racial traits derived from this ethnic difference. Georgian Thomas Cobb concluded about northerners in 1860, “They are different people from us… and there is no love between us.” The slavery controversy, brewing for more than three decades, boiled over to a realization that North and South not only had different interests but were, in fact, different peoples.
Most northerners did not feel compelled to justify their “civilization,” if indeed they stopped to distinguish northern life from American life generally. Some believed that southerners, as slaveholders, were more prone to violence, more of a threat to democratic institutions, and more hostile to progress in general than northerners. The Fugitive Slave Law, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the caning of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, the Dred Scott decision, and the Lecompton fraud convinced many northerners that slave society bred despotism. Much as southerners believed that slavery provided the foundation for a superior civilization, northerners saw the institution as a detriment to the spiritual and economic progress of the nation. In a society dedicated to progress, the future would always be more compelling.
The central flaw in southern society, many northerners were coming to believe, was slavery. In rhetoric reminiscent of Horace Greeley’s lamentations about how the Indian’s forlorn land reflected their lack of enterprise, William H. Seward noted that slavery undermined “intelligence, vigor, and energy” in southern blacks and whites. It produced “an exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads… [and] an absence of enterprise and improvement,” rendering the institution “incompatible with all… the elements of the security, welfare, and greatness of nations.” Hinton Rowan Helper, a North Carolinian, corroborated these charges in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857), a book on the debilitating impact of slavery on the South in general and on southern whites in particular. It became a popular Republican Party campaign document.
When Stephen A. Douglas abandoned his campaign and headed south, he understood the stakes. Threats of disunion had escalated during the campaign. Many in the North, including most Republicans, dismissed these warnings. Southerners had threatened secession periodically since the Nullification Crisis of the early 1830s, and these tantrums had always dissipated. Horace Greeley quipped that “the South could no more unite upon a scheme of secession than a company of lunatics could conspire to break out of bedlam,” and Lincoln confided to a friend that southern talk of disunion was “a sort of political game of bluff… meant solely to frighten the North.” But a generation of invective and the events of the 1850s had taken their toll on Americans. The prospect of a sectional party assuming power in Washington alarmed most southerners. While a majority of southerners did not want to leave the Union, they were not unconditional Unionists; they wanted guarantees that if the Republicans won the election, this sectional, anti-slavery party would not undermine their civilization.”
Note: Unless you were recently kicked in the head by a horse, everyone knows this by now: “Blacks,” whether capitalized or not, isn’t the term that’s used. “Black people” is appropriate. Just add the people. “Blacks,” often not capitalized, occurs throughout much contemporary war, Reconstruction, & other writing. Needless to say, this & some other terms here aren’t ones I liked to type up.
Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 Walter A. McDougall P. 355
“Southerners posed as proud Cavaliers, masters of their domain and all who dwelled therein. That may have been their most painful prevarication. If the planters were secure and benevolent, why did they need strict slave codes, censorship, and armed posses to maintain their system? (South Carolina even forbade slaves to have pet dogs lest they get a feel for being the master.) Why did they stoop at election time to stirring up fears and prejudice among whites who did not own slaves? Why did their “plantation novels” drop copious hints that southern patriarchs weren’t even masters of their own household? George Tucker’s The Valley of Shenandoah (1829) founded the genre. William Alexander Caruthers wrote several such novels, including The Cavalier of Virginia, in the 1830s.”
Note: The impact of Helper’s The Impending Crisis can’t be underestimated (See also March 14, etc). At least three men in Arkansas were hanged for having the book. The book was banned across the South. An 80 page rebuttal by Louis F. Schade was published in 1860. According to Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore (P. 373), “….the Crisis became the most disturbing work contributed to the anti-slavery cause since the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In December of 1859, after the hanging of John Brown, when antagonisms had been further exacerbated, the Crisis came to figure as a decisive factor in the contest for the speakership of the House of Representatives.”
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 12
“It was 1800 before the advance of the plantation was really underway, and even then the pace was not too swift. The physical difficulties to be overcome were enormous. And beyond the mountains the first American was still a dismaying problem. It was necessary to wait until Andrew Jackson*** and the men of Tennessee could finally crush him. 1810 came and went. The battle of New Orleans was fought and won, and it was actually 1820 before the plantation was fully on the march, striding over the hills of Carolina to Mississippi—1820 before the tide of immigration was in full sweep about the base of the Appalachians.
From 1820 to 1860 is but forty years—a little more than the span of a single generation. The whole period from the invention of the cotton gin to the outbreak of the Civil War is less than seventy years—the lifetime of a single man. Yet is was wholly within the longer of these periods, and mainly within the shorter, that the development and growth of the great South took place. Men who, as children, had heard the war-whoop of the Cherokee in the Carolina backwoods lived to hear the guns at Vicksburg. And thousands of other men who had looked upon Alabama when it was still a stubborn jungle, lived to fight—and to fight well, too—in the ranks of the Confederate armies.
The inference is plain. It is impossible to conceive the great South as being, on the whole, more than a few steps removed from the frontier stage at the beginning of the Civil War.”
The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 113 “New South Visionaries.” Peter S. Carmichael
“No single idea united members of the last generation before the Civil War. They shared instead a dilemma: How to restore Virginia to a position of leadership in the Union without sacrificing the virtues of the past or, even worse, remaining in the intellectual backwaters of the world. Exhausted lands and poor economic conditions had forced more than three hundred thousand Virginians to leave for the Deep South or the West by 1850. With an overall declining population, Virginia had fallen to fifth in national population on the eve of the Civil War. In 1810 the state sent twenty-three members to Congress, but in 1860 only eleven represented the Old Dominion in Washington. No longer did Virginia enjoy a prominent position of leadership in the country’s political affairs.
In comparison to the North, the scarcity of railroads, canals, and light industry in Virginia, as well as the paltry sum devoted to education, attested to the state’s backwardness. Older Virginians who resisted progressive reforms and technological innovations were derisively called old fogeys by young Virginians who condemned this class of leaders in general terms. In their attacks on the fogeys, the last generation refrained from singling out an individual politician or a specific political organization. A Hampden-Sydney student captured the frustration of his contemporaries when he wrote in 1859 that “there is an amount of old fogyism amongst us that is absolutely appalling.” Why it took “a generation for a canal to get to Buchanan” and another “twenty-five or thirty years to construct a railroad from one end of the State to the other” he could not understand.”
A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White South Eugene D. Genovese P. 90
“In 1851 the magazine of the University of Virginia’s student Jefferson Society casually referred to Virginians as “the great Anglo-Saxon race, whose destiny seems to be to rule the world.’”
The Field of Blood: Violence In Congress and the Civil War Joanne Freeman P. 12
“Antebellum America was a large-scale nation of small-scale horizons. Other regions were faraway places filled with strange people with strange habits.
P. 26-27
There was also the destabilizing influence of national expansion. The young nation was still in its adolescence, spreading across the North American continent at a remarkable rate. Between 1840 and 1860, seven new states were added to the Union; in 1860, fifteen out of thirty-two states were less than forty-five years old. For many Americans, it was exciting and empowering, seemingly the groundwork of a future empire. It was also unsettling, because each new state raised fundamental questions about the nature of the nation. The question of slavery was front and center—would it, should it, spread and survive?—but it wasn’t the only one. What of native peoples who owned western lands? How far could new states go in setting their own terms? What was the relationship between periphery and center? And what about the logistics? How would this far-flung nation be interconnected? By toll roads? Canals? Railroads? Who could fund and manage their development, and how? And speaking of funding, how active should the national government be in harmonizing the nation’s unsteady and diverse economy as the Industrial Age began to unfold? What role should the government play in handling the period’s many financial panics? There were endless uncertainties, logical enough in a new and growing nation, but unsettling nonetheless.
Congress would help to answer many of these questions, establishing vital precedents. It would play a role in crisscrossing the continent with roads and canals. It would foster industry with protective tariffs on imported goods—or not, depending on which party was in power. It would weigh in on the terms of statehood for every new state, but not without turmoil; although the Constitution and subsequent legislation outlined this process, it left room for interpretation, and the question of slavery expanded to fill much of it. In one way or another, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Congress was shaping the scale, scope, and influence of the national government and how far it could go in shaping the nation.
And the American people knew it. Congress was where the action was. Although the presidency got its share of press coverage—and more during election years—Congress got the lion’s share of column inches. Newspapers routinely printed lengthy summaries of congressional debates as well as congressional commentary. Popular culture kept pace. By the 1850s, there was a virtual school of Congress-bashing in squibs, plays, cartoons, even mock epic poetry. All of these efforts were filled with inside jokes grounded on the assumption that the reading public was remarkably knowledgeable about the day-to-day happenings in Congress.”
The Civil War in 50 Objects Harold Holzer P. 178
Note: On this day a year hence (which is three months after Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation), Frederick Douglass gives a speech in Rochester, NY., excerpts from which will serve as a recruitment broadside widely circulated in Philadelphia, where 53 local leaders signed the document with these headlines:
“MEN OF COLOR, TO ARMS! NOW OR NEVER! THREE YEARS SERVICE! BATTLES OF LIBERTY AND THE UNION! FAIL NOW, & OUR RACE IS DOOMED, SILENCE THE TONGUE OF CALUMNY. VALOR AND HEROISM. PORT HUDSON AND MILlINKEN’S BEND. ARE FREEMEN LESS BRAVE THAN SLAVES. OUT LAST OPPORTUNITY HAS COME. MEN OF COLOR, BROTHERS AND FATHERS! WE APPEAL TO YOU! STRIKE NOW!”
An excerpt: “Better even to die free than to live slaves. This is the sentiment of every brave colored man among us. There are weak and cowardly men in all nations. We have them among us. They will tell you this is the “whiteman’s war;” that you will be :[no] better off after than before the war;” that the getting of you into the army is to “sacrifice you on the first opportunity.” believe them not—cowards themselves, they do not wish to have their cowardice shamed by your brave example.”
Marching with Sherman: Passages from the Letters and Campaign Diaries of Henry Hitchcock, Major and Assistant Adjutant General of Volunteers, November 1864–May 1865 (1927) Major Henry Hitchcock P. 287
(To Mrs. Hitchcock)
IN THE FIELD, GOLDSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA, April 7h 1865
“I used to tell you, hard-hearted as you thought me, that the war must go on, there was no help for it. I know now what that means as I did not then; and yet I am but the more convinced of its truth. The only merciful theory of this war was the one which McClellan talked—nothing more—and Sherman has acted on—“short, sharp, and decisive.” Viewed in the general—and individual exceptions go for nothing on such a scale as this—two things made the rebellion possible; the ignorance of the Southern masses—ignorance of their true interests, their true relations to the Government and to their Northern fellow-citizens, and of their own duty as men,—and the devilish incarnate selfishness of the so-called “chivalry,” whose energy and audacity have been its motive power. The former I believed before I saw it—I have seen it now even more than I believed, seen and heard it from themselves. The latter I have seen too. Both are the legitimate fruits of Slavery and both inevitably tended to intestine strife, anarchy, ceaseless war and national ruin. Nothing but such tremendous lessons as Sherman’s campaigns have taught them could have overcome or enlightened the former; and as to the latter nothing can secure the safety of the nation short of blotting out their influence and if necessary their existence, as a class.”
Note: (1829-1902) Hitchcock was a blueblood St. Louis lawyer & one of a type in a class of that era “spoiling for a fight,” so his famous father wrote Sherman to see if he had somewhere to place his son; in late ’64 Hitchcock joined up on Sherman’s March as Sherman’s personal assistant, or in bigger words, his eventual Assistant Adjutant-General of Volunteers with the rank of Major. Men spoiling for their red badge of courage– whether or not they got one– if from wealth, or if they had political influence, or were owed a favor to someone in Lincoln’s cabinet, could personally appeal for placement where they might see a little action but not get killed. “How I envy the men who bore “the heat and burden of the day!” is what Hitchcock will write to his wife in late April, ’65, as he sprinkles his diary entries with French expressions like nous verrous, Savannah serait prise, and mais il faut vivre—you know…., . “The only drawback is my almost envy of the men around me who have endured hardship and faced danger of three or four years already….” However aware of his situation Hitchcok was relative to men like Ephraim, contrast men like Hitchcock, writing of “the poetry of campaigning”– who even had a Black “assistant”– contrast him with farm folk like Ephraim who volunteered not from careerist motives, & ended up wherever they got sent. They got fired on, got dead, got starved, slept outside, etc. Also contrast with actual conscripts forced at gunpoint to enlist, & who might die trying to escape off a boat (see May 24) or desert to avoid dying (or having to kill others) in the war, men who could not leave the field any time they wanted, for any reason, including a birth or death back home. As well, contrast with Black men in the excerpt right above, Better even to die free than to live slaves. These were the men whose names no one knows, whose names did not survive history, unlike Hitchcock.
Note: It took Cash a decade to write The Mind of the South. He killed himself a couple months after it came out. He had been deeply worried about public response before its publication.
What Caused the Civil War: Reflections on the South and Southern History Edward L. Ayers P. 169
“Cash found little cynicism among these Southerners, no hypocrisy; rather, a “curious innocence.” He saw the New South, from the late nineteenth century on, mired in cultural inertia, dysfunction, falsity, myopia. Strong stuff, and for fifty years hundreds of thousands of readers have listened, responding to the grain of truth in The Mind of the South and admiring the rhetoric deployed with such skill and vehemence.
….he had written his book in a freezing room lit by a single light bulb while neighborhood boys tossed gravel at the window, mocking this strange man….”
Note: W.J. Cash: “What can be said is that Cash seemed to act on impulse, owing to a climactic psychotic delusion. In July 1941 he told his distraught wife that he could hear Nazi agents whispering among themselves nearby, preparing his assassination. During one of his quieter moments, Mary left him alone in their Mexico City hotel room while she went for help. When she returned with a correspondent whom they had met earlier, her husband had disappeared. A search, quickly begun, found him dead in another hotel a few hours later. He had hanged himself with his necktie on the hook of a bathroom door.” The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. Xxxv
And have peace restored to our country again and all things right and our land may be as it once was….
For whom? The question is not often asked by many White people until next century.
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